Comrade Trump's Preemptive Surrender to Russia

We know that Trump's ego is Yuge.  But now Trump is attempting to be Hitler and Neville Chamberlain at the same time.

Previewing his acceptance speech, Trump gave an interview to the New York Times in which he refused to say that the United States would honor its NATO commitments in a specific instance, involving Russia, invoking the Comrade Trump Doctrine:

For example, asked about Russia’s threatening activities that have unnerved the small Baltic States that are the most recent entrants into NATO, Mr. Trump said that if Russia attacked them, he would decide whether to come to their aid only after reviewing whether those nations “have fulfilled their obligations to us.”

The answer is nonsense at best, and preemptive surrender in effect. Bad enough he's destroyed the mutual defense pact and by inference every important treaty to which the honor of the nation is pledged.  But his pal Putin must be in orgasm.  Perhaps as he's pulling the strings.

But of course, the word of the world's superpower and the country he is aspires to lead, as well as world peace and the freedom of the western world is secondary to the Trump Ego:

When asked what he hoped people would take away from the convention, Mr. Trump said, “The fact that I’m very well liked.”

Has anyone told the Manchurian Candidate that the office he's running for is President of the United States, Leader of the Free World, Holder of the Nuclear Codes, and not Prom King?

It Can Happen Here

Update Tues. night: Trump trumpled, Cruz, crushed, abandoned ship.  Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for President.

As Jonathan Chiat noted (in his column "Trump Has Won and the Republican Party is Broken") Earlier in the day Trump had accused Cruz's father of "having conspired to kill President Kennedy."  This is the guy whose father is pretty much documented as having been a sympathizer, if not member, of the Klan.  But according to the Guardian, Cruz had referred to Trump's "battles with venereal disease."

Chiat writes: "Most of America, including a significant minority of Republicans, have seen Trump’s candidacy exactly for the con it is. Trump for President is a category error. He is, as his rivals have described him, a charlatan, a con artist, a congenital liar, a man self-evidently unfit for office at any level, and especially the presidency. As George Will has argued, his unfitness is so manifest that it applies to anybody who considers him suitable for the office; a person is “unqualified for high office because he or she will think Trump is qualified.”

Yet, as if to support Andrew Sullivan's thesis below, Trump has been winning by larger and larger margins, virtually destroying his opponents, and had a growing lead of 30 polling points in California (where the GOP is quite small these days.)  Some of this is very probably a response to Cruz in the negative, big time.  But clearly the con is working with larger numbers of GOP primary voters.  Meanwhile, Bernie's win in Indiana--which doesn't mean much in his chances for more delegates--is preventing the Democratic unity necessary to face  Trump, who is now free to turn his entire attention on Hillary.

TUES. A.M.: It doesn't stop.  The (Republican) former Speaker of the House called Ted Cruz  "Lucifer in the flesh," and satanists who were interviewed renounced him.  His wife, Heidi Cruz, found herself denying that he was the Zodiac Killer--apparently one of those Internet conspiracies given prominence by Comedy Central's Larry Wilmore in his monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner. (Some loved his jokes, some hated them; I thought they were poorly delivered--he seemed a bit overwhelmed-- and consequently just not very funny.)

Meanwhile, a few days after Republican Senator Lindsay Graham said that a Trump presidency would lead "to another 9-11, Donald Trump claimed to CNN that he has more foreign policy experience than anyone, certainly than a former Secretary of State and First Lady. And he made millions in the process (no joke, that's what he said.)

 But the question was in response to a joke at the Correspondents Dinner, this time by President Obama ("They say Donald lacks the foreign policy experience to be President. But, in fairness, he has spent years meeting with leaders from around the world: Miss Sweden, Miss Argentina, Miss Azerbaijan.")

But for those who relished the prospect of being entertained by the Trump shock jock campaign before they settle down to a boring Hillary presidency--maybe not so fast.  The voices have been few but notable--Thomas Franks, then the guy who writes the Dilbert cartoons, and now, at greater length and with elegant arguments, Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine.

Sullivan couches his warning about the power of Trump within a Platonic warning about democracies at their height quickly turning to dictatorships.  He cherrypicks enough characteristics familiar to us now to get your attention.  He continues with an analysis of the erosion of institutional protections against going off the deep end in any directed that the Founders established, and the end of that process (so far) is Trump.

The new media environment unleashes emotion far more than reason, he writes.  And notes the historical pattern of mass movements arises not when things are at their worst but when things are starting to recover (he name-checks Eric Hoffer on this, but it's a known psychological as well as historical phenomenon.)

Sullivan stings every ideology, party, class, point of view and special interest group at least a little (including gay Americans, which Sullivan can get away with, as an outspoken gay man on gender equality and other relevant issues.)  But he is most eloquent interpreting the point of view of the white working class for the elites who read him.  The white working class has been hurt by technology and globalization, then again by the Great Recession and things haven't gotten better except for the elites in charge.

"This is an age in which a woman might succeed a black man as president, but also one in which a member of the white working class has declining options to make a decent living. This is a time when gay people can be married in 50 states, even as working-class families are hanging by a thread. It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate."

Revolutionaries of the 60s haplessly but sincerely tried to make common cause with the working class, even when some of its members were beating them up at antiwar demonstrations.  But today's left, Sullivan writes, has only contempt for them, politically and culturally, considering them racists and sexists:

"A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”"

Of course racism in particular is endemic to Trump's appeal, but self-satisfied ignorance by elites is pretty good cover.  Sullivan sees that the realities cannot be glibly dismissed, even as he highlights the great danger of these emotions being shaped by the likes of Trump."... the most powerful engine for such a movement...is always the evocation of hatred."

Sullivan illustrates the Trump appeals to hatred and violence.  He notes as well the weakness of Hillary's candidacy--that despite Trump's terrible numbers for a general election, her popularity is lower at this point than recent Democratic candidates like Gore and Kerry, who did not become President.

Sullivan ends by addressing the elites who are most likely to be reading his words, to take control, to deny Trump the nomination.  I doubt that's the best prescription for what he sees ailing us, and anyway, after Trump's expected triumph in Indiana later today, it's not going to happen.

What is going to happen, however, will likely be a terrible test.  Without even considering institutional history and philosophies of government, at this time and place we're facing a crisis in the guise of a circus.

Sullivan notes the Sinclair Lewis novel, It Can't Happen Here, and resemblances of the fascist who becomes President in the Great Depression in that fiction, to Trump's basic message.  That story (as in the play version that was one of the Federal Theatre Project's great triumphs, which we commemorated a few years ago with a reading of the play at the Dell'Arte Theatre) is a template for a lot of what we've being seeing from the rabid right and the Republican party for awhile now.  And one feature of it is especially relevant to this campaign: violence on behalf of the candidate.

This is looking like it will be a violent campaign--violent words from candidate Trump and from partisans of both sides, and violence against persons. Just this week Trump supporters in Indiana and West Virginia, and anti-Trump protestors in California are harbingers.  I'm not trying to equate them, but a lot of people will.  Combined with the real threat of Bernie or Bust supporters to divide Democrats and suppress the vote, the danger is too many voters not voting in November.

For that's probably all that has to happen to avoid self-destruction this time, maybe long enough and in a way to throw a different light on all these changes.  And maybe soon enough to deal with the real crises, especially the climate crisis, that threatens not just this democracy, or this society, but human civilization and life as we know it on this planet.

After all the noise and the mud, and perhaps even the blood, people who know better do what is necessary to vote, and vote.  Battling fear, cynicism and despair, vote.  This is the means that's necessary.

Corporate 1984?

The Obama administration is embarking on tougher talk and proposals on jobs, the economy and reining in Wall Street. According to the NY Times: "The tougher approach to financial regulation that President Obama outlined on Thursday reflected a changed political climate, the rebound in big banks’ fortunes after their taxpayer bailout and a shift in power within the administration away from those who had been seen as most sympathetic to Wall Street."

But is it all too late, and was it ever really possible? It's clear now that Republicans and insurance companies--perhaps in conscious collusion--lied repeatedly to the White House before getting brazen on their so far successful attempts to delay a health care bill until they could change the politics enough to kill it.

Corporate money also flowed into creating and maintaining the so-called Tea Party movement, currently with factions at war with each other over money as much as anything else, and the largest group proving to be a profit-making enterprise.

So now the Supreme Court weighs in, by misapplying law to the wrong case, in order to unleash corporate money to further corrupt politics and government. It's the most blatantly political decision since Bush v. Gore.

This has the obvious potential to turn this country into a corporate version of the Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four. Except that it probably won't be that obvious. As repugnant as it is for me to agree with anything in Politico (and I will instead link to the Caucus blog describing it), it had already occurred to me that corporations are unlikely to put their logo on their actual political stands. They could lose customers that way. They are far more likely to continue their currently successful practices of creating dummy advocacy groups and phony scientific research institutes, all with deceptive names--and of course, the lying only starts there.

So the real effect of the decision is probably not in giving corporations the right to buy political commercials but in allowing them to spend a great deal more money contributing to their dummy groups that create and buy political commercials, and otherwise engage in buying politicians.

What dim hope there is for balance resides in corporations with a stake in the future--technology companies and those engaged in clean energy businesses, for example. Plus the citizen activism that can boycott offending companies, although to be effective, these boycotts may require some self-induced pain. Will people stop using their electricity completely once a month, say, to protest even more coal and oil money pouring into politics?

Of course this doesn't work so well for health insurance, since the whole goal of these insurers has been to soak up market share and then kill off or eat the competition, so that they have a monopoly in entire areas, even entire states and regions. Making sure they got no new competitors--a public option, say--seems to have been the first stealth goal of killing health care, although killing any sort of regulations on their conduct came in a close second.

In an immediate sense, the clear beneficiaries of the Supreme Court decision will be media companies and public relations firms. We will soon be even more awash in bullshit--all of which we pay for as surcharges to every product and service we buy--as wells as more Newspeak and doublethink, on the way to thoughtcrime and the Thought Police.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

The oppressors' specific methods and identities continue to mystify Doc to some degree...but he divines their overarching goal: to close the frontiers of consciousness forever by rendering life in the shadows impossible and opening the soul itself to view, or at least criminalizing its excursions into deeply subjective, hidden realms. The age of the private eyes is over, that is, and with it the age of privacy itself. And what's left? The sleepless, all-seeing, unblinking public eye."

Walter Kirn, reviewing Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
New York Times Book Review 8/23/2009

Who Are We

The other side of celebrating our liberty is to contemplate the liberty we have so recently and so easily given up, and why. "A nation may lose its liberties in a day," observed Montesquieu, "and not miss them for a century." Or not understand their import until an outsider puts them in context, as Alberto Manguel does when he writes about the centuries of suppressions and destructions, the book-burnings and censorships, that we may feel are relics of the past and disreputable habits of other nations and their systems that don't cherish and protect free expression and knowledge. Sure, there are isolated incidents in certain school districts, but these are not the norm, and certainly not national policy.

But in The Library at Night, Manguel reminds us of "Section 215 of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, allowing federal agents to obtain records of books borrowed at any public library or bought at any private bookstore," without offering a reason, and forbidding the library or bookstore to disclose the request or the giving of this information, including to the person targeted.

The other side of celebrating our national identity and the values at its center is to notice where we violate those values and that identity. Manguel provides an example of this as well, for in his descriptions of libraries and legacies destroyed over the centuries--from the burning of the libraries of Alexandria and of the thousands of books containing the cultural legacy of the Mayans and Aztecs, to the Nazis and various Communist governments, he adds the days in 2003 when in the chaos created by the Anglo-American invasion, and with their troops standing by and doing nothing, "the National Archives, the Archeological Museum and the National Library of Baghdad were ransacked and looted. In a few hours, much of the earliest recorded history of humankind was lost to oblivion."

Though this was a direct consequence of American ignorance and arrogance,
it was set in motion ultimately for the same reason as the Patriot Act: fear, both disproportionate and all too easily manipulated. It was this unreasoning fear, which in the end looks a lot like national cowardice, that permitted other outrages. We know what they are, but sometimes the so-called "debate" over them is exposed as baseless and phony, in the form of simple, direct statement, as provided by Gareth Peirce in the London Review of Books:

Seven years ago now, in January 2002, came the first shocking images of human beings in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic, much as other human beings had been carried in slave ships four hundred years earlier. The captor’s humiliation of these anonymous beings – unloaded at Guantánamo Bay, crouched in open cages in orange jumpsuits – was deliberately displayed. The watching world needed no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions to understand that what it was seeing was unlawful, since what is in fact the law precisely mirrors instinctive moral revulsion. The definitions of crimes against humanity, and war crimes, are not complex: ‘Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949’, including ‘torture or inhuman treatment’; ‘wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health’; ‘wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial; unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement.’ What the world could instantly see for itself in those images was that this was the trafficking of human beings."

Once again the ultimate culprit is fear, and how easily our liberties and identity falls to it. We may find solace in the changes made since: the U.S. no longer officially permits torture, but torture was officially committed, libraries and booksellers were monitored, and as a society we have not yet fully acknowledged and condemned these acts, which might go a long way towards making it less likely they will recur. Those who opposed these acts were called unpatriotic, when it was especially dangerous to be so accused. Until these acts are themselves condemned as unpatriotic, we have not affirmed these liberties and identity.

Besides which, these threats are not all in the past. We know someone who in the past week was pulled out of his seat on a commercial aircraft by federal marshals, despite passing through security, showing his boarding pass, etc. Even though the airline quickly acknowledged its error, he was forced to miss his flight and all connecting flights, more than doubling his travel time to nearly 24 hours. There is no escaping the likelihood that this happened to him because he has dark hair and a dark complexion. That he's an Italian-American only makes this outrage a clear echo of a similiar situation, another acquaintance, also Italian American but as well the son of a prominent political figure in Washington, who was also pulled out of line for no other discernable reason. That was in 2002. This is 2009, and it is still happening.

When the Newspaper Dies

On Sunday I posted a diary at Daily Kos about the rapid end of newspapers and the threats to magazines. I called it Gloating Over Dying Newspapers? Think Again because I noticed a certain glee in blog posts (at Daily Kos and elsewhere) over the death or threats to the existence of newspapers. Some comments that followed denied anyone was gloating, followed by a number of other comments that, well, gloated. I tried to keep the post direct, uncluttered with a lot of links, to make a simple point. Judging by some comments, I'm not sure I got through. I noticed later that Paul Starr at the New Republic made similar points--though with excellent historical background and analysis--and got similar responses.

That post follows with one quote and link added, and after that a few additional links and quotes.


Some in the blogosphere seem to take great pleasure in the demise, threatened and actual, of U.S. newspapers. Focusing on greedy corporations, some with a political agenda, as well as infuriating big name columnists and political reporters, and glorying in the success of the Internet and the blogosphere, they gleefully greet this rapid series of newspaper deaths--or at least fatal illnesses--as the triumph of the new media over the old.

Be careful what you wish for. While all those objections and characterizations may be valid, they aren't the whole story. The death of major city newspapers and threatened national magazines will deal the blogosphere a mortal blow, as well as leaving major gaps of information that eventually may threaten the civil order. This is a very big deal.

Paul Starr writes, "More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt."

There is one transcendent reason why this becomes a serious problem for the gathering and communication of news: newspapers pay thousands of reporters a living wage that enables them to report. By and large, the Internet does not.

This is the case of an information medium dying off before its replacement is ready.

What percentage of the content on blogs like [Daily Kos] originates in newspapers? I'd be surprised if it was under 90%, in terms of actual information, actual reporting.

Even when blogs break a story--as Daily Kos and Talking Points Memo did recently in exposing Bobby Jindal's false account of being where he wasn't during Katrina--the information that the stories put together and compare come largely from wire service and local newspaper stories.

Most of what appears in the blogosphere is opinion, comment, synthesis and reporting on reporting. There have been cases where citizen reporters have been marshaled to analyze documents, etc. but those are special instances. There's a limit to how much reporting can be done without reporters paid a living wage to report.

Without newspapers, without magazines, we're left with a small number of reporters for U.S. radio (mostly NPR) and reporters for television news--and all of them depend to a large extent on newspaper reporting.

I'm writing this as people in Colorado are in shock over the closing of the Rocky Mountain News. Despite its right wing advocacy, it did significant reporting, and became integral to a regional identity.

Now here in northern California we learn that the San Francisco Chronicle is weeks away from possibly closing. This will leave a major city, and a major center of future-oriented activity, without a daily newspaper. The Philadelphia Inquirer and News are in bankruptcy. Even the New York Times and Washington Post are on shaky ground.

The reasons for all this are beyond the scope of this diary, except to say if you look carefully, many of these businesses are in trouble not because the newspaper specifically is failing. It's not all about a preference for the Internet as a news source.

What I do want to focus on are the reporters. Newspapers function because they pay people a living wage--most often a union wage. (It seems to me that some of the statements by publishers and corporate types complaining that newspapers have failed to "adapt" is yet more code for getting rid of unions, which usually means the Newspaper Guild.)

A few of the larger blog sites employ reporters and editors. But not many--and I doubt many of these are union wage jobs. I would be very surprised to learn that the total number of paid reporters on the Internet surpasses the number of paid reporters on one daily newspaper in a mid-size American city.

This is not lost on some folks in the blogosphere and elsewhere. Though Josh Marshall is optimistic about the Internet's future, he also admits: "If all the big papers disappeared right now and we replaced them with 50 TPMs, it wouldn't come close to doing the job," he said.

From that same Washington Post article: "If you don't have people out working as full-time reporters, there's this category of information that's not going to appear magically out of nowhere," said Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University's School of Journalism.

There are a number of proposed solutions out there, and frankly none of them seem very good to me.(I am specifically not endorsing charging for information online.) But the first step is to recognize what is at stake here, and this is my first diary in that regard. It's a time to be alarmed. It's not a time to gloat. --30--

Here's an additional quote from an excellent article on the ramifications for local and political news coverage by Marc Fisher in the Washington Post:

Many bloggers say that far from being able to replace professional reporters, they actually suffer from the diminished flow of state news. "What I can't offer on my blogs is the relationships, the institutional memory, the why, the history that reporters who know the capital can bring to their stories," says Waldo Jaquith, who blogs on Virginia politics and runs a site, RichmondSunlight.com, that tracks every bill. "Newspapers can describe the candidates for governor in a more balanced, deeper way because you don't have a dog in the race. We bloggers do."


Here are some additional relevant passages from Starr's article:

Should we care? Some observers, confident of the blessings of technology, refuse to shed any tears for the traditional giants of journalism, on the grounds that their troubles are of their own making and of little consequence to the general welfare. In this view, regardless of whether newspapers successfully adapt to the Internet, new and better sources of news will continue developing online, and they will fill whatever void newspapers leave. Others are so angry at the mainstream media--the reviled "MSM"--that they see the economic misery of the press as a deserved comeuppance. Let the bastards suffer.

These reactions fail to take into account the immediate realities and the full ramifications of the crisis threatening newspaper journalism. This is no time for Internet triumphalism: the stakes are too high. Nearly all other news media, except for online news, are also retrenching, and--particularly at the metropolitan, regional, and state levels--the online growth is not close to offsetting the decline elsewhere. Despite all the development of other media, the fact is that newspapers in recent years have continued to field the majority of reporters and to produce most of the original news stories in cities across the country.

Drawing on studies conducted by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, the project's director, says that as of 2006 a typical metropolitan paper ran seventy stories a day, counting the national, local, and business sections (adding in the sports and style sections would bring the total closer to a hundred), whereas a half-hour of television news included only ten to twelve. And while local TV news typically emphasizes crime, fires, and traffic tie-ups, newspapers provide most of the original coverage of public affairs. Studies of newspaper and broadcast journalism have repeatedly shown that broadcast news follows the agenda set by newspapers, often repeating the same items, albeit with less depth.

Online there is certainly a great profusion of opinion, but there is little reporting, and still less of it subject to any rigorous fact-checking or editorial scrutiny.

No online enterprise has yet generated a stream of revenue to support original reporting for the general public comparable to the revenue stream that newspapers have generated in print.

Whether the Internet will ever support general-interest journalism at a level comparable to newspapers, it would be foolish to predict. The reality is that resources for journalism are now disappearing from the old media faster than new media can develop them. The financial crisis of the press may thereby compound the media's crisis of legitimacy.

Already under ferocious attack from both left and right for a multitude of sins, real and imagined, the press is going to find its job even more difficult to do under economic duress. And as it retrenches in the face of financial pressures, Rosenstiel says, "More of American life will occur in shadows. We won't know what we won't know."

News Flash--Not A Terrorist

This man was taken off the U.S. terrorist
watch list today. I feel so much safer. Just
winning the Nobel Peace Prize 15 years ago
apparently didn't remove Nelson Mandella
from suspicion. But such bureaucratic contempt
for one of the most admired men on the planet
is hardly the only evidence of this administration's
ineptitude and corruption in its fraudulent war
on terror. There's a new outrage revealed nearly every day.

Like the covert CIA operative in the Middle East who claims that the
Bushites not only ignored his intelligence that
Iraq wasn't working on WMD and Iran had stopped
its nuclear weapons program--his lawyer claims that
"On five occasions he was ordered to either falsify
his reporting on WMD in the Near East,or not to file
his reports at all." This was reported today, as was
the federal court opinion that threw out the government
case against a Guantanamo prisoner as baseless--merely
repeating the same allegation in three documents. The
judge said it reminded him of a Lewis Carroll nonsense
poem. But Wednesday's literary news will also include
The Manchurian Candidate, when the NY Times reports
that torturers at Guantanamo were instructed using a
chart describing Chinese techniques used on Americans
during the Korean War. Said Sen. Carl Levin, “What makes
this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques
to get false confessions.” This is the War on Terror
waged in our name, and permitted by our representatives
of both parties, enabled by how easily Americans were
and perhaps are manipulated by the most simplistic appeals
to fear.

J'Accuse!

This month (last Saturday to be exact) marks the 71st anniversary of the German bombing of Guernica, which essentially inaugurated the mass terror bombing of World War II. Five bombing raids with incendiary bombs dropped from primitive aircraft resulted in some 1650 deaths in this small market town in Spain. By the end of World War II, bombers and missiles killed thousands in London in the Blitz, and massive numbers of sophisticated aircraft and powerful bombs killed 100,000 mostly civilians in Dresden and 130,00 in Tokyo, before the atomic bombs killed at least 280,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Two generations later, much of the world has internalized the horror of that war, as well as the different but in some ways worse horrors of World War I. But America has not, argues Tony Judt in an indispensable article in the New York Review of Books. Some of our political thinkers even argue that such history--any history--is irrelevant as a guide to our present and future, because the bad old past is over, and things are different now.

So Judt asks the question in the title of his piece: "What Have We Learned, If Anything?" What's clear to him--and to me--is what we haven't learned: "In the US, at least, we have forgotten the meaning of war." One of the main reasons is that in the 20th century, we were lucky. War hardly touched us--not the World Wars, not even the waves of terrorism that Europe experienced, let alone other parts of the world. But even though the lessons of those wars are available to us in accounts, in eloquent writings and filmmaking, we haven't learned them. Instead, we are going through what we should have learned to avoid. For example:

"World War I led to an unprecedented militarization of society, the worship of violence, and a cult of death that long outlasted the war itself and prepared the ground for the political disasters that followed. States and societies seized during and after World War II by Hitler or Stalin (or by both, in sequence) experienced not just occupation and exploitation but degradation and corrosion of the laws and norms of civil society. The very structures of civilized life—regulations, laws, teachers, policemen, judges—disappeared or else took on sinister significance: far from guaranteeing security, the state itself became the leading source of insecurity. Reciprocity and trust, whether in neighbors, colleagues, community, or leaders, collapsed. Behavior that would be aberrant in conventional circumstances—theft, dishonesty, dissemblance, indifference to the misfortune of others, and the opportunistic exploitation of their suffering—became not just normal but sometimes the only way to save your family and yourself. Dissent or opposition was stifled by universal fear.

War, in short, prompted behavior that would have been unthinkable as well as dysfunctional in peacetime. It is war, not racism or ethnic antagonism or religious fervor, that leads to atrocity. War—total war—has been the crucial antecedent condition for mass criminality in the modern era. "

Americans fought and died in the two world wars--but Over There. Americans could observe what happened in those societies, but the lessons didn't take. We didn't experience what they experienced, starting with the extent of death and destruction.

"In World War II, when the US lost about 420,000 armed forces in combat, Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., records the deaths of 58,195 Americans over the course of a war lasting fifteen years: but the French army lost double that number in six weeks of fighting in May–June 1940...

But it is civilian casualties that leave the most enduring mark on national memory and here the contrast is piquant indeed. In World War II alone the British suffered 67,000 civilian dead. In continental Europe, France lost 270,000 civilians. Yugoslavia recorded over half a million civilian deaths, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million. These aggregate figures include some 5.8 million Jewish dead. Further afield, in China, the death count exceeded 16 million. American civilian losses (excluding the merchant navy) in both world wars amounted to less than 2,000 dead. "

So what does this mean?

"As a consequence, the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies—seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."

Judt writes in detail about how this also leads us to misjudge our enemies, particularly in the so-called war on terror. Another consequence is this administration's attitude to torture, which used to be the dividing line between democracies and dictatorships. " Torture really is no good, especially for republics. And as Aron noted many decades ago, "torture—and lies—[are] the accompaniment of war.... What needed to be done was end the war."
We are slipping down a slope. The sophistic distinctions we draw today in our war on terror—between the rule of law and "exceptional" circumstances, between citizens (who have rights and legal protections) and noncitizens to whom anything can be done, between normal people and "terrorists," between "us" and "them"—are not new. The twentieth century saw them all invoked. They are the selfsame distinctions that licensed the worst horrors of the recent past: internment camps, deportation, torture, and murder—those very crimes that prompt us to murmur "never again." So what exactly is it that we think we have learned from the past? Of what possible use is our self-righteous cult of memory and memorials if the United States can build its very own internment camp and torture people there? "

I would add something else to Judt's point: it's not only that Americans didn't experience war the way others did, it's also that America--with all these years of prosperity, access to education and information--is still so fond of being ignorant. We don't learn from history because we don't respect the ability to learn from history. We demand our leaders bowl well and be the kind of guy or gal you can have a shot and a beer with. Not that they know anything, or can bring any insight and intelligence to the problems that are killing us, and laying waste the world. Just so they talk tough. We'll keep at if it takes a hundred years! We'll totally obliterate them!

It's not like the lessons of war and the 20th century are unavailable. On TV the other night I happened to see some of Abel Gance's great 1919 film, J'Accuse. There are scenes of men killed in war rising up and returning to accuse those who profited by the war and their deaths (scenes that Gance used again in his 1937 remake.) Some of the men in those scenes were actual soldiers, who shortly afterwards were killed in battle. We are seeing the dead returning, literally. Asked the meaning of his film's title, Gance said: "I am accusing war. I am accusing man. I am accusing universal stupidity."

That was almost 90 years ago. And yet, this past week a story broke about retired military officers trotted out as experts by television news networks to explain the Iraq war and the war on terror, who were not only political instruments of the Cheney administration, but paid by companies profiting from the war. Said the New York Times: " The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air." J'Accuse!

But these days the news media can't even be bothered to justify the war--they ignore it. They ignore that April has been the deadliest month in Iraq since last September. J'Accuse! Meanwhile, contractors who have made billions to reconstruct Iraq have cheated, lied, done shoddy work or didn't finish the job, and still got rich. J'Accuse! For all the good it will do.

Judt's article concludes:

" Far from escaping the twentieth century, we need, I think, to go back and look a bit more carefully. We need to learn again—or perhaps for the first time—how war brutalizes and degrades winners and losers alike and what happens to us when, having heedlessly waged war for no good reason, we are encouraged to inflate and demonize our enemies in order to justify that war's indefinite continuance. And perhaps, in this protracted electoral season, we could put a question to our aspirant leaders: Daddy (or, as it might be, Mommy), what did you do to prevent the war?"

That last sentiment in fact was a slogan in the 60s (though not a bumper sticker--no one would dare put it on the back of a car, if you wanted an intact windshield.) Our hope ultimately is today's young, like the black junior high age boy I saw the other day, wearing a t-shirt with the script familiar from the Star Wars movies, only the words said: "Stop Wars." But way before he is an adult, Americans have to come to grip with this failure to learn. Or it could be too late.

The Nightmare Reality

Those who opposed the Vietnam War in the mid to late 1960s were a reviled minority, derided as radical and unpatriotic, and risking life (from armed soldiers and angry fellow citizens) and more often lungs (from the nearly ubiquitous tear gas) to protest in public. But whatever convictions motivated them, they--we-- were also armed with information.

Some of that information was analytical, historical, geopolitical-- but much of it concerned what was actually happening in the Vietnam war, and later in Laos and Cambodia when the war widened. At first it was reported only in "underground" newspapers and magazines, or clearly radical periodicals like Ramparts. But there was one seemingly unlikely publication that was not really underground, yet not really an organ of journalism: it was the New York Review of Books.

Sometimes in essays which contained original reporting, and then as time went on, in long, descriptive reviews of books on the subject, the realities of the war were revealed. These realities were otherwise unknown, ignored and especially denied by government officials and much of the press. I still remember how I felt reading the review of Air War-Vietnam by Frank Harvey, a book I suspect is long out of print. (There are other, bloodless books of that title by other authors still around.) There was on the scene reporting, and simple if devastating facts. The review featured long quotations. I also remember standing in our college coffee shop during one of our periodic "teach-ins" and reading some of these quotations, at one point not able to control the emotion in my voice.

We are in the midst of another war now. With far less censorship or as censorious a public, we are just as in the dark as then. The mystery of what really is happening in Iraq is the result of the dangers there, certainly, but also the result of timid and inadequate reporting by lazy, cowardly, greedy corporate media, and by a particular yet perennial wish to be spared those realities here in America. And I don't want to see those photos or read those accounts any more than anyone else does.

So it takes courage to get in our faces with it, and we again must rely on the New York Review of Books to tell us the truth. Michael Massing did so in a review of two new books and consideration of four others in a December issue. A major part of the mystery, as Massing knows and shows, is mystification. Some of it, as in Vietnam, is official misinformation, disinformation, secrecy and lying. But much of it, as in Vietnam, is in language. Including most particularly the abstractions that mask the realities of what warfare is doing to the Iraqi people and civilization, to Iraq itself, and to the Americans sent there with terrible weapons in their hands, ordered to do terrible deeds.

We have our particular abstractions now, bloodless yet aggressive, the language of Pentagon briefings, television reporting, and video games. That language is used in some of the books Massing mentions. For example: McElhiney realized he would have to fight in close quarters and destroy the Iraqi air defenses one at a time. Using 30mm guns and rockets, he took out the mosque...Covered by Cobras, the Marines headed north to the town from the western side of the Gharraf River, paralleling Highway 7. Craparotta's 3/1 moved up and...cleared the town.

But what "took out the mosque" and "cleared the town" means in human terms is left to some of the other on the ground accounts in other books:

We pass a bus, smashed and burned, with charred human remains sitting upright in some windows. There's a man in the road with no head and a dead little girl, too, about three or four, lying on her back. She's wearing a dress and has no legs.

Heading north, the Marines find themselves amid the palm trees and canals of the Fertile Crescent, but all around are signs of death. Along the highway are torched vehicles with "charred corpses nearby, occupants who crawled out and made it a few meters before expiring, with their grasping hands still smoldering." Lying beside one car is the mangled body of a small child, face down, whose clothes are too ripped to determine the gender.."

This brutality inevitably affects those who find themselves committing it, but new innocents are sent to do the same, because no one can face these realities, no one wants to be accused of being 'against the troops':

"After leaving the corps, Fick drifted. Combat, he realized, "had nearly unhinged me." Worst of all, he writes, were the "blanket accolades and thanks from people 'for what you guys did over there.' Thanks for what, I wanted to ask—shooting kids, cowering in terror behind a berm, dropping artillery on people's homes?"

Some of these books consider the effects of the machinery of war. For example, the "smart bombs" get all the publicity, but most of the damage in the initial invasion and more traditional battles is done by imprecise but highly destructive artillery fire. In the terrorist phase, the slaughter of innocent civilians by Americans with immense firepower is common. One Marine says of the civilians:

"They're worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don't even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this—all these women and children we're killing? Fuck no. Back home they're glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you. Saying our president is a fucking hero for getting us into this bitch. He ain't even a real Texan."

This is all part of modern warfare, though it gets more terrible and obscene with each increase in the technology of rending human bodies and blowing lives and landscapes apart. And so is the civilian squeamishness. There were exhibits in the capitals of both sides in World War I, in both London and Berlin, that purported to show how comfortable the trenches were for the soldiers. In that war (as attested by books like All Quiet on the Western Front) the lies and denial at home were part of what bound soldiers together, more strongly than national identity, in the knowledge and the experience of war that only they had.

The utter horror of war should be its greatest deterrent, but it cannot be, if warfare is nothing but abstraction and romance, sport and patriotic expression. When we soaked ourselves in the awful truths of Vietnam, we risked despair, and I suspect that it dogged us all our lives since. But the alternative is this abstract opposition, without the hard urgency to end the automatic madness, and to see that such an infantile response to the manipulations of leaders without conscience has led us again into such thoughtless, unfeeling consent to make war without extreme cause.

If you had read those reviews in the Vietnam era, you would have known before this war started what horrors were ahead. It's time to face what's happening now, end it, and remember, for the proposed next time. And forget the sentimentalities of the Greatest Generation, or the war hero, or thanking soldiers for their service. We can't ignore our responsibilities to returning soldiers--to do so is the other side of denial and sentimentality. But to simply engender another generation of sacrificial killers is not going to put the end to war.

It Does Happen Here

It was late in that awful day, September 11, 2001, and as media mouths were speculating what terrorist attacks we might expect next, I said (and have a witness who remembers this) that whatever this terrorist group would try to do, it wouldn't again involve boarding airplanes and turning them into missiles aimed at particular targets. The success of that intention required surprise, which was effectively over when the passengers, having learned of the Twin Towers, brought down their hijacked airliner over Pennsylvania.

But for the next six years ordinary airline passengers were forced to take off their shoes and (more recently) turn over their shampoo, and undergo various other humiliations and inconveniences beyond sane screening and precautions. And to question any of this--especially on the spot--could get you arrested, blacklisted on a no-fly list, and might even get you disappeared.

So it took six years plus for the truth to quietly emerge in a study: that none of this has made any damn difference in making flying safer or it catching terrorists. "Can you hide anything in your shoes that you can't hide in your underwear?" is one of the pertinent questions.

A week or so after this study was reported in December, an oped by a commercial pilot (and now a writer for Salon) appeared in the New York Times, laying out the reasons why these actions and restrictions are folly, and have always been. He has no new data--all this was known at the time each idiocy was instituted.

But no one wanted to hear this, just as for years they didn't want to hear how improbable being the victim of a terrorist attack in the U.S. would be, compared with much more common ways we get hurt and/or die. Easing fears may have been part of the intent of these "make work" procedures, but they also institutionalized Fear. So we got Bushwhacked in 2004, and Rudy would like to repeat it in 08.

Humiliating people, stripping them of their clothes in public, where have we seen this before? Making people vulnerable makes them passive. It's one step towards a police state. It trains citizens to be docile and authorities/police/soldiers to be aggressive, and pretty soon arrogant in the use of power, the threat of force and force itself. And I believe there are powerful people in this country who know this, and intend this.

But we sheep don't even bleat. That study, quietly issued a few days before Christmas, changed nothing for passengers. Big companies got big contracts to do all this, and the ease with which news organizations have smuggled devices onto airplanes that could have been bombs, or the vulnerabilities of our ports and shipping, means nothing. As long as we the people take off our shoes and bow before the great authority of the state, and leave our nail clippers at home.

Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Series

Here's the movie/ TV series we're apparently living in: Marty McFly goes back to the future and discovers that in the early 21st century the United States is becoming a totalitarian oligarchical pseudo-theocratic no-nothing paranoid dictatorship, thanks to the accession of George W. Bush to the presidency. Let's hope he's back to the past, figuring out how to prevent it so that this time-line can end.

Those of us inside this sad story are deep into Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the series, updated with cell phones and Internet Newspeak babble. Latest evidence centers on torture and the denial of Constitutional rights, and the astounding fact that Guantanamo, the American Gulag, is still open for business, and the Bushites are still fighting to retain their anti-Constitutional powers. There's the news that the CIA destroyed tapes of a torture session, and at least some outrage about it. It's clear now that so much of the Bushites' furious activity defending torture and spying is to protect their asses against courts to come.

Speaking of which, the Supreme Court is determining at this very late date just what rights those swept up by the Bushite Shock Doctrinaires in their war of terror really should have. On anything before the Court, I've found Linda Greenhouse to be the very best guide. Surprisingly, she seems to sense that the Court is not going to rubber-stamp the Bushite retrenchment to police state barbarism, but the actual decision won't happen until summer.

Another subplot of the series is the skittering towards theocracy and further intolerance, with damage not only to Constitutional freedoms but the unfettered creativity of thought so necessary to our particular future.

The Christian Right's political and organizational disarray, and the silence coming from the White House since reelection, may have suggested this is yesterday's news--until Mitt Romney's speech this week showed just how far we've fallen in recent decades. That the speech was billed as this Mormon candidate's statement mirroring JFK's famous speech to hostile Protestant ministers about being Catholic and running for President--that in fact Romney used JFK's speech as a virtual Cliff's Notes for his--showed how far we've moved from the Constitution.

There are a couple of good articles at salon on the subject (and as they point out, Mike Huckabee is an even more direct threat), but getting to them can be pretty annoying. And there's this specific comparison, with links to others. The JFK passage that's so telling is this one:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

Granted, that the "no Protestant minister would tell his parishoners for whom to vote" was a bit tongue in cheek, because even then the more fundamentalist wing was willing to do so. But it wasn't the norm, and it wasn't done openly. Of course now, it's become standard, and because it's accepted, so much more dangerous. Go back another 30 years to Sinclair Lewis warning that when dictatorship comes to America, it will come under the banner of Christianity.

Romney's speech didn't come out and call for America as a Christian nation (nor is Huckabee likely to, though he comes close), but he does attempt to hijack the Founding Fathers to support his notion that we've got no America, no Constitution, without organized religion and belief in God. Which god, whose god, that's never said, but it's part of the tradition to make a few references to "our Jewish friends" and even "our Catholic friends" while meaning the Protestant God. These days it's a little different than in the Christians vs. Communists 50s--there's more common cause among the most rabidly conservative wings of Protestant, Jewish and Catholic religions, as they come more and more to represent the whole of their bloc. Conservative--meaning traditional-- beliefs are honorable. Intolerance is another matter entirely, and that's where these folks are heading. Some of them are already there, openly. The next step is the Christian police state.

Romney's announced enemy is the "religion" of "secular humanism," a patently political attempt to make common cause with this contortion of categories spawned in the Reagan era that never quite caught on except as fund-raising bait in fundie mega-churches. Maybe a little better than the War on Christmas for rallying the Christian soldiers marching not as to, but to, war. Still, the implication leads to Guantanamo for secular humanists. Far-fetched? Look around, and tell me about far-fetched.

They'll be marching to war against their fellow countrymen, who must no longer be free to muse and make the most personal and most human judgments imaginable on the basic issues of our existence. To differ is to be cast out. It's as totalitarian as you can get, and leads directly to 1984 oppression and, even more directly, to dullness and stupidity.

Too bad. Really too bad. Because if we're going to have a future, we won't get there by mindless adherence to dogma, by blindness, dull comformity and stupidity. It is in enforcing these that religion becomes--in a kind of ultimate irony--soul-destroying. And these days, future-destroying too.

The China Syndrome

Bringing the Dalai Lama to the White prior to officially presenting him with the Congressional Medal of Freedom was a welcome distraction for the Bushites. Photographs with one of the most respected and beloved people in the world and especially in the U.S. helps diffuse the image of the vetoer of life-saving medical care for children, and it draws attention to the 1989 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and away from this year's winner, Al Gore, whose honor is yet to be acknowledged at the White House.

But it sure pissed off the Chinese government. Like most imperialists, it goes nuts when its brutal aggression and even more brutal colonial administration is even implictly, even theoretically or possibly questioned. In this case, China's armed takeover of Tibet included the murder of thousands of Buddhists, and its war against the Dalai Lama (the traditional political as well as spiritual leader of Tibet) has forced it into absurd embarrassments, the most recent of which is outlawing reincarnation without government approval.

But the White House doesn't want to piss them off too much. "We in no way want to stir the pot and make China feel that we are poking a stick in their eye for a country that we have a lot of relationships with on a variety of issues," said press secretary Dana Perino. " No, not with China financing the Iraq war and the further mega-enrichment of Bushites and their cronies, and leaving the piper to be paid by future American generations, one way or another.

Besides, China has become a kind of model for the Bushites: it has shown that a nation can get good p.r. for coming out against tyranny and murder in Darfur and Burma while still do nothing to endanger profits gained in relationships with those countries. And above all, the greatest lesson of China today, though no one wants to say it out loud, is that capitalism without democracy works just great. Something that the Bushites have certainly taken to heart.

Who are the Terrorists?

Terrorists use fear and intimidation for their political ends. It's not necessary to kill and physically maim to spread terror. It can be done, for example, with torture that creates physical pain and psychological maiming. Or it can be done, as it is being done, in other ways.

When the government sows fear as its official position, it sanctions intimidation. We've all seen it at the airport, all the useless humiliations, the no-fly lists created by unknown and unaccountable people for unknown reasons, and a police state atmosphere that leads to abuses like this --the death of a white upper middle class wife and mother who's last known words were, "I am not a terrorist!"

There are the radio talk show and right wing blog terrorists who know no boundaries of truth or decency in attacking those they disagree with, even if it involves terrorizing children. Right wing terrorists seek to frighten and destroy and otherwise silence anyone who dissents from their assertions.

They started in the 90s and they continue with unrestrained ferocity: the cultural/political terrorists, so that a high school band playing Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" gets a visit from the Secret Service, and fifty years after a court ruled it not obscene and it has become an American classic, a New York public radio station quakes in fear and won't allow Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" on the air. They help to create an atmosphere in which intimidation once again comes to the fore in expressing racial hatred.

And when the Supreme Court fails to defend Constitutional rights to free speech when it doesn't conform with the dogma of those right wingers in power, and fails to defend basic legal rights established by the Magna Carta, it too has become a terrorist institution.

The Bush White House uses fear for political purposes so often that it isn't even news anymore, but unfortunately, it is often still effective. They're trying it again now by using a supposed new terrorist threat to use fear both in Congress and in voters to help defeat a bill limiting its spying powers--though its opposition now is mostly to protect its crony corporations and its own individuals from paying fines or going to jail--because there is very good evidence that they all have violated specific laws with these penalties numerous times.

The Bushites didn't invent the technique--many despots and dictators have used it before--but they've mostly gotten away with it. But by using fear of terrorists to terrorize Congress, voters and American men, women and children into supporting the policies and beliefs the White House and its cronies want and which will benefit them, while silencing dissent with intimidation--the question by now should be painfully clear: just which terrorists threaten us the most?

Paint Them Black

The fallout from the Blackwater incident continues. The warm-up to congressional hearings today (Tuesday) is a congressional report citing the "security" (read: mercenary) company for some 195 shooting incidents in Iraq since 2005. That's nearly two hundred in less than two years, more than one a week -- "in a vast majority of cases firing their weapons from moving vehicles without stopping to count the dead or assist the wounded," according to the New York Times report. In 163 of those cases, Blackwater gunmen fired first.

The recent incident that grabbed the attention of the Iraqi government--Blackwater allegedly killing civilians on September 16-- is being investigated by the FBI.

The Times also wrote: But the report is also harshly critical of the State Department for exercising virtually no restraint or supervision of the private security company’s 861 employees in Iraq. “There is no evidence in the documents that the committee has reviewed that the State Department sought to restrain Blackwater’s actions, raised concerns about the number of shooting episodes involving Blackwater or the company’s high rate of shooting first, or detained Blackwater contractors for investigation,” the report states.

This is entirely consistent with Bushite policy and practice: no-bid, no-oversight, no-accountability contracts to enrich corporate cronies and bankrupt the U.S. government. Blackwater's "security" mandate is to protect the private property of Halliburton--that is, the Green Zone--and Halliburton's in-country customers, the U.S. "officials" and the Army. And they do so outside and above the law, another Bushite favorite.

Blackwater and other mercenaries have already been seen on the streets of New Orleans, and if any other disasters happen while the Bushites are in charge, you can be sure the future is black.

The Dreaming Up Daily Image

illustration with my review in
Sunday's SF Chronicle, by Rico
Mendez.

The Shocks That We Are Heir To

I've mentioned The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein's new book before, but now it's out in the U.S. I reviewed it in Sunday's San Francisco Chronicle, and this is how I began:

The connections are daring in journalist Naomi Klein's new book, "The Shock Doctrine," but the result is convincing. With a bold and brilliantly conceived thesis, skillfully and cogently threaded through more than 500 pages of trenchant writing, Klein may well have revealed the master narrative of our time. And because the pattern she exposes could govern our future as well, "The Shock Doctrine" could turn out to be among the most important books of the decade.

The rest of the review is here.

There's also a good review in the Guardian.

The Shock Doctrine

The Must-Read Book of the Year

--maybe even the decade. THE SHOCK DOCTRINE : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" by Naomi Klein has just been published in Canada, which means I can finally talk about it. I've been reading the galleys for weeks--which brings up a second ethical problem, because I've just turned in my review to the SF Chronicle, and I shouldn't scoop that. But my review won't be out for a few weeks, and I know I'm going to be blogging from the content of this book well before then.

Though THE SHOCK DOCTRINE will be officially published in the U.S. and Europe later in September, it may be in some bookstores soon. Naomi Klein is traveling and talking about it, starting today. And there's a short film about it, by Klein and "Children of Men" director Alfonso Cuaron, at the Toronto Film Festival this Friday, and she's showing it at some of her appearances.

Before I say a little more about the book, my disclaimers: I have no personal or business relationship with the author (I've never met her) or the publisher. I just think this is a very important book, and one that people should be aware of--and consider getting behind, in case corporte media ignores it (a good bet.)

Some of you (especially in Canada and Europe) probably know Naomi Klein as an activist, journalist and filmmaker, who writes for The Nation and The Guardian, often about globalization issues, and who wrote the book, No Logo as well as a collection of columns, Fences and Windows. Her writing career started in Canada, and here in the U.S. especially, she's not generally well known, and that's one reason I'm blogging on this book right now. Her interview in Publisher's Weekly said she didn't at that point have any firm media bookings in the U.S. I'd like to see that change. She deserves a hearing more than a whole lot of people we hear too much from.

As for the book, it puts together a lot of what you might know and suspect (and a lot most people missed or don't know) into a powerful framework based on a central idea that she believes has governed American foreign policy for decades, but particularly now: THE SHOCK DOCTRINE.

She relates neocon (also known as "neoliberal" outside the U.S.) economic theories of "free market fundamentalism" and the resulting economic "shock therapy" many nations endured, to the actual (and horrific) theories and practice of early actual electroshock therapy, and shows how they relate to torture, and the "shock and awe" bombing of Iraq, and an overall pattern of taking advantage of disaster or creating it, for corporate profit.

She shows for example that Iraq and New Orleans were not the result of incompetence, but examples of disaster capitalism, which requires the destruction and privatization of the public and non-profit sectors, replaced by crony capitalism. She shows that torture is not an accident, but a tool of economic and political shock therapy.

The book's web site has more information, including access to many of her sources. But the book is the thing--it's very well written, and very important. It begins with Milton Friedman and Pinochet in Chile in the 70s, and brings together most of what has happened since (in South America, Russia, Asia,etc.), culminating in Iraq and, in the U.S., the homeland security state and post-Katrina New Orleans.

This book has the potential to be Very Big. The Guardian has named it one of the ten must-reads of the fall. But it could also be overlooked--intentionally, because of its content.

Every book arrives with blurbs, but not necessarily like the ones for this book from Arundhati Roy, John Le Carre, Howard Zinn and Sy Hersh. I join them in urging you to read and support this book. It could be one of those rare books that everyone reads and talks about, and that focuses the debate, and promotes needed change.

Now that I've said all that, I'll feel much more comfortable about blogging on topics within the book, and I hope to do that--several times--soon.

UPDATE: The Shock Doctrine short film is now viewable online. On its first day of publication, the book hit #1 on Amazon Canada.

Clear and Present Danger

UPDATE: Suggestions in the blogosphere that Cheney is orchestrating an early September sales campaign for war on Iran.

The noise is killing us in more ways than one. We keep missing the important stories. Sometimes because they're deliberately hidden and those whose job it is to discover and tell these stories just aren't doing it. When the Bushites sneaked a provision into the huge Defense Authorization Act last October that allows the President to declare martial law--to override state and local officials and use the military as domestic police in response to unspecified "emergencies"-- virtually no one reported it. It remains what it was supposed to be, a secret.

In this case, one which potentially makes dictatorship legal. For the entire history of the Republic, every President could declare martial law only if threatened with an armed insurrection. That's how seriously this nation's founders considered it, and not in the most perilous times in our history has this law changed, until last October.

But right now we're missing a crucial story that's totally public, that in fact President Bush announced in a media-covered speech. Even most of the lefty blogs, currently feasting on the Idahomosexual story, ignored it.

Fortunately one of the more respected bloggers, Glenn Greenwald, didn't. Perhaps Bush's threat against Iran sounded like the same old. Greenwald calls it "the most disturbing speech of his presidency." It sounded to me when I heard just the soundbite that it was tantamount to an announcement that this administration is going to militarily attack Iran, very soon.

Nobody wants to believe Bush will do it. It's too much of an utter nightmare. The military is overstretched to the breaking point in Iraq. There's some question as to whether orders would be followed, although Bush--or should we say Cheney--is likely to depend on the Air Force and Navy who have paid less of a price and may want more of the action. And nobody wants to contemplate what a disaster it could very well begin.

It seems in fact like madness. Apart from the rising guilt over needless death in Iraq, the Washington and media establishments are apparently willing to tolerate a crazy President and an insane Vice-President for a year and a half more, assuming they will confine their looniness to surreal speeches and delusional press conferences. We wish. But it seems increasingly like we're not going to get off that easy.

So far the human price of Iraq has been paid (at least directly) by a relative few, and the bulk of the cost has been pushed into the future. Bush's design in Iraq seems to be to push obvious failure past the expiration of his term, so Republicans can blame Democrats should they win the White House and retain Congress. But a sustained bombing of Iran would likely begin a sequence of events that would make Iraq pale by comparison. The calculation might be that an even greater war, a regional war with global reach, would force voters to support the war party and its candidate, Rudy Giuliani or Fred Thompson.

Such an attack and such a war have endless possibilities for catastrophe that might transform the country, and could very well destroy it. A wrecked domestic economy, energy rationing, a military draft--it could well end up with the realization of that first untold story: martial law in America, brought to you by Halliburton and Blackwater.

And don't forget, the plans for attacking Iran as initially revealed involved the U.S. using tactical nuclear weapons. It is a particularly dangerous moment, when the fundamentalist neocon ideology still drives the Bush-Cheney government, and when that government has little power beyond blackmailing Congress to continue the Iraq war and using military power against anyone it chooses. The dirty secret of declining American power in the world under Bush is that this government is forced more and more to consider, if not rely on, its trump: the world's most obscenely powerful stockpile of nuclear bombs.

But even without nuclear weapons, a sustained air campaign against Iran could turn the tinderbox of the Middle East into a raging fire of regional war, with consequences too long-lasting and too extensive and damaging to contemplate.